More than 150 e-commerce and delivery companies globally use an Indian logistics startup’s service to work out the optimum way to ship items to their customers.
That startup, Noida-based FarEye, said today it has raised an additional $13 million to close its Series D financing round at $37.5 million.
FarEye first unveiled its Series D round in April this year when it raised from Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Eight Roads Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, and SAIF Partners.
The startup said today industry veterans Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal’s Fundamentum Partnership led the extended round, with participation from KB Global Platform Fund.
FarEye helps companies orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. Say you order a pizza from Domino’s, the eatery uses FarEye’s service, which integrates into the system it is using, to quickly inform the customer how long they need to wait for the food to reach them.
Behind the scenes, FarEye is helping Domino’s evaluate a plethora of moving pieces. How many delivery people are in the vicinity? Can it bundle a few orders? What’s the maximum number of items one can carry? How experienced is the delivery person? What’s the best route to reach the customer? And, would the restaurant need the same number of delivery people the following day?, explained Kushal Nahata, co-founder and chief executive of FarEye.
Logistics firms have made minimal investment in digitisation. So, “the amount of visibility they have over their own delivery network is minimal. Forget what a customer should expect,” said Nahata, explaining the challenges the industry faces.
FarEye is addressing this by using AI to parse through more than a billion data points to identify the optimum solution. In the past one year, it has fine-tuned its algorithm to handle last-mile and long-haul deliveries to offer a full-suite of services to its clients, said Nahata.
The startup, which raised capital for the second time in the middle of the global pandemic, said the virus has accelerated business activities for most of its clients as more people buy online to avoid visits to neighbourhood stores. In India, the current e-commerce orders exceed those of pre-coronavirus days already, he said.
The fresh capital will help the startup as it looks to scale ahead of the festive season, when people in India spend lavishly and thereby give more business to FarEye’s clients. It’s also the time when e-commerce firms clock record sales. Rest of the focus is on international expansion, said FarEye.
The startup, which already has clients in the U.S., Europe, and Singapore, plans to further its growth outside of India. Nahata said several of its existing clients have extended their tie-up for operations in other markets.
“Investment in the logistics space is essential for the economic growth of any nation. FarEye has captured the pulse of this industry and has all the ingredients to head towards global leadership. I believe in the founders and the team has the clarity of vision. We are excited to partner with FarEye in its journey to create a global technology leader in the logistics space,” said Aggarwal of Fundamentum, in a statement.
